Draw Antonio, and don't Waste Time: on the exhibition Fra Angelico to Leonardo, Renaissance Drawings, at the British Museum, 2010

7/28/2019 Draw Antonio, and don't Waste Time: on the exhibition Fra Angelico to Leonardo, Renaissance Drawings, at the Br

1/5

1

Draw Antonio, draw Antonio, draw and dont waste time.

How does one represent the world, in all its

three dimensional plenitude, on a two

dimensional surface? When Picasso split a

womans face in several parts and showed us

each segment from a different point of view,

he was addressing this question. In the art of

representation, this is a core problem, one that

is always implicit in those artefacts that we

call pictures.

Italian artists of the early fifteenth century

tackled this problem in such a way as to alter

permanently Western concepts of pictorial art. If earlier artists, such as Giotto, had

begun to explore the possibilities of creating a sense of volume on a flat surface, it

was a Florentine architect and sculptor who famously formulated a system for thatpractice. In 1413, Filippo Brunelleschi painted two panels, both architectural views,

now lost but described in detail by his biographer, Antonio Manetti. The panels

served as a visual treatise, a pictorial invention. Arguably, the foundational status of

Brunellescis device lies in the fact that it transcended the boundaries that kept

science and art apart.

That invention of Brunelleschis

known as artificial or linear

perspective established the

rules for the proportional

diminution of three-

dimensional objects painted on

a two-dimensional plane. Those

rules both presupposed and

defined the idea of a

homogeneous, continuous, isotropic geometric space. Since Modernism, this system

which was considered to be the realisation of the structure of vision itself has

Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings

British Museum, London

22 April - 25 July, 2010.


2/5

2

been deemed to have run its course. Yet perspective is everywhere with us. We are

now so accustomed to the look of perspective in a drawing or painting, a graphic

novel or an advertisement, that we hardly think of it as either a convention or an

invention: perspective has been naturalised.

Perspective suggests, in the first instance, a stable point of view, a fixed location from

where a view is taken. (In this respect, pre-digital and pre-Photoshop photographs

appropriated the conventions of perspective, for they too were the products of a

single, unmoving point of view.) As a consequence of this immobility of the viewer,

perspective also introduces the idea of a frame: a boundary delimiting the field of

vision encapsulated by that particular vista, that singular snapshot. So perspective

is intimately linked to the idea of a picture, defined as a bounded object, one that

differs greatly from the expansive, scroll-like, horizontally linear narratives of

frescoes painted directly on church or palace walls. These are story strips that require

large spaces with ritualised functions, for they invite the viewer to follow them not

only visually, but also physically: you walk and look, walk and look or, bored with

prayer, you turn your head this way and that, looking all around you. With the

perspectival picture, the viewer is enlisted to a different kind of observation, a more

private contemplation of a single, framed image. Even though most twentieth

century art was furiously engaged with ways of breaking loose from post-

Renaissance pictorial conventions, with the Renaissance picture was also born the

idea of a kind of reverential, hushed spectatorship that is still with us: museum

viewing as we know it. Historically, this kind of spectatorship is also increasingly

linked to a sense of deference to the artist as an individualised maker and possibly

even as a genius.

In its ideal form, then, the

Renaissance picture gives us

a glimpse into a world that

not only seems measurable,

but that also places the

human subject at its centre.

My bodily scale provides the

measure for the seen

universe, for things (even

imaginary things, like dragons) larger and smaller than myself as they find their

positions upon a three-dimensional stage whose axes are determined by my

sovereign gaze. It is as ifmy gaze, my fixed point of view, were the source of this


3/5

3

image as it systematically unfurled away from me; as if, in looking at the picture, I

were both looking through a window, and inventing the scene.

This directional address to a subjective, individual gaze was matched by an increase

in the naturalism of the figures depicted. With the particularities of the spatial

competence that perspectival drawing granted artists, came the need to place figures

within that illusory space rather than frieze-like in front of it, just as actors might be

positioned three-dimensionally within the space described by the proscenium stage.

Gesture loses the hierarchical simplicity of earlier icons and becomes not only

purposeful for the narrative but also expressive; faces and bodies are increasingly

nuanced, inflected with humanity, with interiority. With this kind of naturalistic

painting, the need to draw more accurately, paying great attention to plasticity and

detail, became paramount. Drawing lay at the heart of Italian Renaissance picture

making. Draw, Antonio; draw Antonio, draw and dont waste time, Michelangelo

scrawled on a sketch he gave his pupil and assistant, Antonio Mini, in 1524.

An exhibition at the British Museum in London gathers about a hundred

Renaissance drawings, magnificently exhibited under the majestic dome of what

used to be the Reading Room. For all their diversity, the works in the show make a

cohesively breath-stopping display. Bringing together rarely seen and extremely

delicate works from the collections of the British Museum and the Uffizi Gallery in

Florence (arguably the worlds two foremost collections of Renaissance drawings),the show is one of those once-in-a-generation, if not once-in-a-lifetime opportunities

to see works that were not intended to be seen by the broader public.

Affected by the diffusion of print making from

northern Europe, more formally elaborated

finished drawings have been exhibited from

Renaissance times, but the idea of viewing a

sketch as work of art is a fairly recent one, dating

to the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.

Prior to this, roughly worked drawings were

regarded either as the private annotations of an

artist the artists thoughts given visual form or

as preparatory stages in the construction of a

more finished work of art. Yet our contemporary

sensibilities are primed for the contingent, the

manifold, the experimental and the hesitant, and

to our eyes, many of the drawings on show look like finished masterpieces in theirown right.


4/5

4

Most of the studies in the exhibition are directed towards the production of a

painting. As a collection of works, the exhibition also reveals the extent to which

drawings are a form of visual capital, establishing an archive of motifs (animals,

body parts, drapery) that an artist might wish to use in

other works. The exhibition tracks the major stages in the

making of a Renaissance painting, from the loose sketches

that initially explored details of anatomy, architecture and

drapery; to gridded drawings used to plot the position of

each constituent part of the projected work; finally to the

life-size cartoons that were employed as the blueprint for

a finished composition. The contours defined in the cartoon

would be laboriously pricked with a pin, enabling the artist

to transfer the image precisely, using powdered chalk orpastel. The more minutely elaborated, completed

compositional drawings could have the added purpose of

demonstrating to the patron the person funding the

commission what the finished, painted composition

might look like.

But alongside the various functions and techniques of

drawing, we are also shown the diversity of drawing styles

over time: the decorative cascade of folds in the drapery of

Parri Spinellis St Peter Holding a Key (1435-45) compared to

the far more volumetric drapery of Bartolommeo Montagnas A Bearded Man with a

Turban (1490-1500) or the sculptural, finely hatched drapes in Michelangelos An Old

Man wearing a Hat (1495-1500). Further into the show, a geographical perspective

drawing styles as they evolved in the different Italian city states expose other

shared pictorial values, famously, the Florentine emphasis on line compared to the

Venetian privileging of tone.

In excellent wall texts and a substantial catalogue essay, the curators of the

exhibition, Hugo Chapman and Marzia Faietti, underline the important and often

neglected material factors that condition the way an artistic style or medium

develop. Essential to the understanding of how and why drawing became so popular

in the fifteenth century (and here I am not going to enter into the vexed question of

causalities and tautologies, chickens and eggs) was the development of the

techniques of paper making as a cheaper substitute for vellum. The increased

popularity of paper making served, a bit like Gutenbergs press, to make drawing


5/5

5

more economically viable and nurtured the expansion of drawing as a studio

practice, where a century earlier it hadnt existed at all.

Compared to the burnished, completed quality of Renaissance

paintings the paintings for which many of these works were

preparatory studies the drawings here look so fresh and lively

that it is almost as if, in the process of finishing a painting, some

thought became not only crystallised, but also entombed. By

comparison, a drawing is like a thought as it darts around trying

to find form and expression: mercurial, experimental, alive. A

drawing is a precious opportunity to see the unfolding of an

artists process, working procedure in its temporal unfolding. In

Leonardos exceptional studies of the Christ child playing with a

cat, we feel the inarticulate joy of the child as he embraces the

animal, feel the animals impulse to squeeze and wriggle away. With uncanny

resonance of Leonardos cat, we see the Christ child in Raphaels Studies of the Virgin

and Child (ca. 1506-7) trying to slide away from

his mothers embrace, as if wishing to escape his

sacrificial destiny. At the same time, the agitated

pen marks in both these drawings are the

temporal record of the process of capture of the

image, from eye to hand and back again. It is a

rare opportunity to be with Leonardo, with

Raphael, in the making of a work.

Indeed, it is this very quality a vivacity, a sense

of the presence of the artists hand, that so

animates this exceptional exhibition. It is as if we

were taken back five centuries and shown the

workings behind the scenes, made privy to the

processes, the material and conceptual considerations, that constituted studio

practice. Dont miss this show and if you do miss it, get the catalogue!

Ruth Rosengarten

5 May 2010.

Documents

Draw Antonio, and don't Waste Time: on the exhibition Fra Angelico to Leonardo, Renaissance Drawings, at the British Museum, 2010